I have seen many people (including the creators) talk in hand-wavy terms about how the restricted size of Twitter messages forces people to consider the economy of communication before they post. I disagree. It doesn't force more efficient communication, it forces the bulk of people to use more abbreviations and invent esoteric words. Forcing people to invent words and rely on acronyms to communicate does not imply more efficient communication, it implies an overly restrictive format and framework.
Getting Old means having to learn what glucosamine is and why you have to take it twice a day.
A small reminder to myself that a default installation of CentOS 5.3 does not, by default, include the Compat packages. The effect this has on Web Server is an installation that appears to have succeeded (bits are laid down on disk), but is completely unconfigured (no default instance or Admin instance are created). Re-running the installation and actually reading the screens shows an error:
Product Status Information
1. Sun Java System Web Server Configuration Failed View log file
Looking at the error logs shows this:
"World of Warcraft servers taken down for maintenance and client patch 3.1.0 rollout. Outage clocked at more than 16 hours. National productivity increases by 10%."
It seems as though Blizzard's methodology for maintaining their World of Warcraft servers is to take them offline early Tuesday morning (often around 1:00am or 2:00am Pacific time) and to keep them offline until between 9:00am and 11:00am. During the client patch 3.1.0 rollout they took the servers offline at 1:00am and, at the time of this writing, don't have them back online yet. Instead there is a message on the client login screen indicating that "there were problems found in testing" and "we'll try to have the realms back online in the next two-to-three hours."
I'm installing that phenominal time-sink World of Warcraft (I actually have legitmate reasons for doing this ... honest). So far I have watched it download patches and updates for TWO FRICKEN HOURS. And without telling me, WoW decided to download all these many megabytes of patches over a BitTorrent system. This got me a nice lil' nastygram from my ISP (my ISP prohibits torrent traffic for technical reasons).
